Why are his comments in this thread getting downvoted? They show a quite nuanced understanding of S. I. and raise interesting points.
If there is no requirement for the observed data to be at the start of the string that is output, then the simplest program that explains absolutely everything that is computable is this:
Print random digits. (This was actually a tongue-in-cheek Schmidhuber result from the early 2000s, IIRC. The easiest program whose output will assuredly contain our universe somewhere along the line.)
Luckily there is such a requirement, and I don’t know how MWI could possibly fit into it. This unacknowledged tension has long bugged me, and I’m glad someone else is aware of it.
He identifies subtleties, but doesn’t look very hard to see whether other people could have reasonably supposed that the subtleties resolve in a different way than he thinks they “obviously” do. Then he starts pre-emptively campaigning viciously for contempt for everyone who draws a different conclusion than the one from his analysis. Very trigger-happy.
This needlessly pollutes discussion… that is to say, “needless” in the moral perspective of everyone who doesn’t already believe that most people who first appear wrong by that criterion that way in fact are wrong, and negligently and effectively incorrigibly so, such that there’d be nothing to lose by loosing broadside salvos before the discussion has even really started. (Incidentally, it also disincentivizes the people who could actually explain the alternative treatment of the subtleties from engaging with him, by demonstrating a disinclination to bother to suppose that their position might be reasonble.) This perception of needlessness, together with the usual assumption that he must already be on some level aware of other peoples’ belief in that needlessness but is disregarding that belief, is where most of the negative affect toward him comes from.
Also, his occasional previous lack of concern for solid English grammar didn’t help the picture of him as not really caring about the possibility that the people he was talking to might not deserve the contempt for them that third parties would inevitably come away with the impression that he was signaling.
(I wish LW had more people who were capable of explaining their objections understandably like this, instead of being stuck with a tangle of social intuitions which they aren’t capable of unpacking in any more sophisticated way than by hitting the “retaliate” button.)
Were capable of and bothered to, I suppose. I rarely bother to explain the reasons for my value judgments unless I’m specifically asked, and sometimes not even then. Especially not when it comes to value judgments of random people on the Internet. Low-value Internet interactions are fungible.
See edit on this post . Also, note that this tirade starts from going down to −6 votes (or so) on, you know, perfectly valid issue that Solomonoff induction has with expressing the MWI. You get the timeline backwards. I post something sensible, concise and clear, then I get it down −6 or so, THEN I can’t help it but assume utter lack of understanding. Can’t you see I have my retaliate button too? There’s more downvotes here to pointing out a technical issue normally without flaming anyone. This was early in my posting history (before me disagreeing with anyone massively thats it):
I’m sorry; I was referring to what I had perceived as a general pattern, from seeing snippets of discussions involving you while I was lurking off-and-on. The “pre-emptive” was meant to refer to within single exchanges, not to refer all the way back to (in this case) the original discussion about MWI (which I’m still hunting down). Now that I look more closely at your history, this has only been at all frequent within the past few months.
I don’t have any specific recollection of you from before that comment on the “detecting rationalization” post, but looking back through your comment history of that period, I’m mystified by what happened there too. It’s possible that someone thought you were Thomas covertly giving a self-justifying speech about a random red-herring explanation he’d invented to tell himself for why other people disagreed with him, and they wished to discourage him from thinking other people agreed with that explanation.
I responded privately earlier… I really don’t quite know why I still bother posting here. Also btw, there’s other thing: I posted several things that werequite seriously wrong, in the sense of wrong chain of reasoning (not outcome). Those were upvoted and agreed with a fair lot.
Also, on the MWI, I am a believer that as far as we know there can be many worlds out there, and even if quantum mechanics is wrong it is fairly natural for mathematics to work out to many worlds, and it is not like believing in the apple cake in the asteroid belt. I do not dislike the conclusion. I dislike the argument. Ditto for Solomonoff induction and theism, I am an atheist. I tend to be particularly negative towards the arguments that incorrectly argue in favour of what I believe, on the few times that I notice the incorrectness (obviously that got to be much less common than seeing incorrectness in the arguments in favour of what I don’t believe).
p.s. please note that the field is VERY full of impossibility proofs (derived from Halting Problem) which are of the form ‘this does not resolve” (and full of “even if you postulate that this resolves, then something else doesn’t resolve”) and I do not look very hard indeed into the possibility that the associated subtleties resolve. Please also note that the subtlety of ‘the output must begin with data’ is not the kind of subtlety that resolves in any way. I can sometimes be very certain that a subtlety does not resolve; most of the time I am not certain (this field is outside my field of expertise) and I seldom if ever comment on those points (e.g. I refrained from commenting on Solomonoff induction here in the beginning of my post history) and I do not comment negatively on those.
The Solomonoff induction is a very complicated topic and it requires very careful consideration before the speculations. Due to it’s high difficulty the probability of subtleties resolving is considerably less than in the less complicated topics.
The subtleties I first had in mind were the ones that should have (but didn’t) come up in the original earlier dicussion of MWI, having to do with the different numbers of bits in different parts of an observation-predicting program based on a physical theory, and which of those parts should have their bits be charged against the prior or likelihood of the physical theory itself and which of the parts should have their bits be taken for granted as intrinsic parts of the anthropic reasoning that any agent would need to be capable of (even if some physical theories didn’t use part of that anthropic reasoning “software”).
(I didn’t specify what the subtleties were, and you seem to have picked a reading of which subtleties I must have been referring to and what I must have meant by “resolve” that together made what I was saying make no sense at all. This might be another example of the proposed tendency of “not looking very hard to see whether other people could have reasonably supposed” etc. (whether or not other people in the same reference class from your point of view as me weren’t signaling that they understood the point either).)
Well, taking for granted some particular class of bits is very problematic when you have brute force search over values of those bits. You can have a reasonably short program (that can be shorter than physics) which would iterate all theories of physics and run them for a very very long time. Then if you are allowed to just search for the observers, this program will be the simplest theory, and you are effectively back to the square one; you don’t get anything useful (you got solomonoff induction inside solomonoff induction). Sorry I still can’t make sense out of it.
I also don’t see why I should have searched for possible resolutions, and assume that other party has good reason to expect such resolution, if I reasonably believe that such resolution would have a good chance at Fields medal (or even a good reason to expect such resolution would).
I also don’t like speculative conjectures via lack of counter argument as combined with posts like this (and all posts inspired by it’s style), and feel very disinclined to run the highly computationally expensive search for possible solutions by a person that would not have such considerations about the entire majority of scientists that he thinks believe in something other than MWI. (in so much as MWI is part of CI every CI endorser believes in MWI in a way, they just believe that it is invalid to believe in extra worlds that can’t be observed, or other philosophical stance that is a matter of opinion).
edit: that is to say, the stance often expressed on MWI here is normative: if you don’t believe in MWI you are wrong, and not just that, but the scientific community is wrong for not believing in MWI. That is the backgrounder. I do believe many worlds are a possibility, but I do not believe the above argument to be valid. And as you yourself have eloquently explained, one should not proclaim those believing in MWI to be stupid on basis of unresolved problems not being resolved (I do not do that). But this also goes with CI, and I am not the community that is being normative about what is rational and judges by MWI belief status whenever one’s rational. edit2: and I do not see how this strong-pro-MWI stance is compatible with awareness of the subtleties. Furthermore, at the point when you make so many implicit assumptions about subtleties resolving in your favour, you could as well say Occam’s razor; it is not appropriate to use specific term (Solomonoff induction) to refer to something fuzzy.
a troll is someone who posts inflammatory extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion
Let’s see:
inflammatory: check
extraneous: sometimes, not in this case
off-topic: not exactly
intent to provoke/disrupt: not in my estimation
so, maybe 25-30% trollness.
Safely assume bad faith.
I never get this impression from his posts. They seem honest (if sometimes misguided) not malicious to me.
Intent makes a difference for me. private_messaging seems to want to get his point across (not counting an occasional rant), without regard to the way his comments come across. I did not detect any intent of riling people up for its own sake.
I suspect that others downvote private_messaging because of his notoriety. I did downvote his comment because he strayed away from my explicit (estimate the complexity of the Newton’s 2nd law) request and toward a flogged-to-death topic of MWI vs the world. Such a discussion has proven to be unproductive time and again in this forum.
I suspect that others downvote private_messaging because of his notoriety. I did downvote his comment because he strayed away from my explicit (estimate the complexity of the Newton’s 2nd law) request and toward a flogged-to-death topic of MWI vs the world. Such a discussion has proven to be unproductive time and again in this forum.
Likewise. (With the caveat that I endorse downvoting extreme cases based on notoriety so probably would have downvoted anyway.)
Why are his comments in this thread getting downvoted? They show a quite nuanced understanding of S. I. and raise interesting points.
If there is no requirement for the observed data to be at the start of the string that is output, then the simplest program that explains absolutely everything that is computable is this:
Print random digits. (This was actually a tongue-in-cheek Schmidhuber result from the early 2000s, IIRC. The easiest program whose output will assuredly contain our universe somewhere along the line.)
Luckily there is such a requirement, and I don’t know how MWI could possibly fit into it. This unacknowledged tension has long bugged me, and I’m glad someone else is aware of it.
He identifies subtleties, but doesn’t look very hard to see whether other people could have reasonably supposed that the subtleties resolve in a different way than he thinks they “obviously” do. Then he starts pre-emptively campaigning viciously for contempt for everyone who draws a different conclusion than the one from his analysis. Very trigger-happy.
This needlessly pollutes discussion… that is to say, “needless” in the moral perspective of everyone who doesn’t already believe that most people who first appear wrong by that criterion that way in fact are wrong, and negligently and effectively incorrigibly so, such that there’d be nothing to lose by loosing broadside salvos before the discussion has even really started. (Incidentally, it also disincentivizes the people who could actually explain the alternative treatment of the subtleties from engaging with him, by demonstrating a disinclination to bother to suppose that their position might be reasonble.) This perception of needlessness, together with the usual assumption that he must already be on some level aware of other peoples’ belief in that needlessness but is disregarding that belief, is where most of the negative affect toward him comes from.
Also, his occasional previous lack of concern for solid English grammar didn’t help the picture of him as not really caring about the possibility that the people he was talking to might not deserve the contempt for them that third parties would inevitably come away with the impression that he was signaling.
(I wish LW had more people who were capable of explaining their objections understandably like this, instead of being stuck with a tangle of social intuitions which they aren’t capable of unpacking in any more sophisticated way than by hitting the “retaliate” button.)
Were capable of and bothered to, I suppose. I rarely bother to explain the reasons for my value judgments unless I’m specifically asked, and sometimes not even then. Especially not when it comes to value judgments of random people on the Internet. Low-value Internet interactions are fungible.
See edit on this post . Also, note that this tirade starts from going down to −6 votes (or so) on, you know, perfectly valid issue that Solomonoff induction has with expressing the MWI. You get the timeline backwards. I post something sensible, concise and clear, then I get it down −6 or so, THEN I can’t help it but assume utter lack of understanding. Can’t you see I have my retaliate button too? There’s more downvotes here to pointing out a technical issue normally without flaming anyone. This was early in my posting history (before me disagreeing with anyone massively thats it):
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ai9/how_do_you_notice_when_youre_rationalizing/5y3w
and it is me honestly expressing another angle on the ‘rationalization’, and it was at −7 at it’s lowest! I interpret it as ‘7 people disagree’.
edit: also by someone I tend to refer to ‘unknown persons’, i.e. downvoters of such posts.
I’m sorry; I was referring to what I had perceived as a general pattern, from seeing snippets of discussions involving you while I was lurking off-and-on. The “pre-emptive” was meant to refer to within single exchanges, not to refer all the way back to (in this case) the original discussion about MWI (which I’m still hunting down). Now that I look more closely at your history, this has only been at all frequent within the past few months.
I don’t have any specific recollection of you from before that comment on the “detecting rationalization” post, but looking back through your comment history of that period, I’m mystified by what happened there too. It’s possible that someone thought you were Thomas covertly giving a self-justifying speech about a random red-herring explanation he’d invented to tell himself for why other people disagreed with him, and they wished to discourage him from thinking other people agreed with that explanation.
I responded privately earlier… I really don’t quite know why I still bother posting here. Also btw, there’s other thing: I posted several things that werequite seriously wrong, in the sense of wrong chain of reasoning (not outcome). Those were upvoted and agreed with a fair lot.
Also, on the MWI, I am a believer that as far as we know there can be many worlds out there, and even if quantum mechanics is wrong it is fairly natural for mathematics to work out to many worlds, and it is not like believing in the apple cake in the asteroid belt. I do not dislike the conclusion. I dislike the argument. Ditto for Solomonoff induction and theism, I am an atheist. I tend to be particularly negative towards the arguments that incorrectly argue in favour of what I believe, on the few times that I notice the incorrectness (obviously that got to be much less common than seeing incorrectness in the arguments in favour of what I don’t believe).
p.s. please note that the field is VERY full of impossibility proofs (derived from Halting Problem) which are of the form ‘this does not resolve” (and full of “even if you postulate that this resolves, then something else doesn’t resolve”) and I do not look very hard indeed into the possibility that the associated subtleties resolve. Please also note that the subtlety of ‘the output must begin with data’ is not the kind of subtlety that resolves in any way. I can sometimes be very certain that a subtlety does not resolve; most of the time I am not certain (this field is outside my field of expertise) and I seldom if ever comment on those points (e.g. I refrained from commenting on Solomonoff induction here in the beginning of my post history) and I do not comment negatively on those.
The Solomonoff induction is a very complicated topic and it requires very careful consideration before the speculations. Due to it’s high difficulty the probability of subtleties resolving is considerably less than in the less complicated topics.
The subtleties I first had in mind were the ones that should have (but didn’t) come up in the original earlier dicussion of MWI, having to do with the different numbers of bits in different parts of an observation-predicting program based on a physical theory, and which of those parts should have their bits be charged against the prior or likelihood of the physical theory itself and which of the parts should have their bits be taken for granted as intrinsic parts of the anthropic reasoning that any agent would need to be capable of (even if some physical theories didn’t use part of that anthropic reasoning “software”).
(I didn’t specify what the subtleties were, and you seem to have picked a reading of which subtleties I must have been referring to and what I must have meant by “resolve” that together made what I was saying make no sense at all. This might be another example of the proposed tendency of “not looking very hard to see whether other people could have reasonably supposed” etc. (whether or not other people in the same reference class from your point of view as me weren’t signaling that they understood the point either).)
Well, taking for granted some particular class of bits is very problematic when you have brute force search over values of those bits. You can have a reasonably short program (that can be shorter than physics) which would iterate all theories of physics and run them for a very very long time. Then if you are allowed to just search for the observers, this program will be the simplest theory, and you are effectively back to the square one; you don’t get anything useful (you got solomonoff induction inside solomonoff induction). Sorry I still can’t make sense out of it.
I also don’t see why I should have searched for possible resolutions, and assume that other party has good reason to expect such resolution, if I reasonably believe that such resolution would have a good chance at Fields medal (or even a good reason to expect such resolution would).
I also don’t like speculative conjectures via lack of counter argument as combined with posts like this (and all posts inspired by it’s style), and feel very disinclined to run the highly computationally expensive search for possible solutions by a person that would not have such considerations about the entire majority of scientists that he thinks believe in something other than MWI. (in so much as MWI is part of CI every CI endorser believes in MWI in a way, they just believe that it is invalid to believe in extra worlds that can’t be observed, or other philosophical stance that is a matter of opinion).
edit: that is to say, the stance often expressed on MWI here is normative: if you don’t believe in MWI you are wrong, and not just that, but the scientific community is wrong for not believing in MWI. That is the backgrounder. I do believe many worlds are a possibility, but I do not believe the above argument to be valid. And as you yourself have eloquently explained, one should not proclaim those believing in MWI to be stupid on basis of unresolved problems not being resolved (I do not do that). But this also goes with CI, and I am not the community that is being normative about what is rational and judges by MWI belief status whenever one’s rational. edit2: and I do not see how this strong-pro-MWI stance is compatible with awareness of the subtleties. Furthermore, at the point when you make so many implicit assumptions about subtleties resolving in your favour, you could as well say Occam’s razor; it is not appropriate to use specific term (Solomonoff induction) to refer to something fuzzy.
private_messaging is a troll. Safely assume bad faith.
Wikipedia:
Let’s see:
inflammatory: check
extraneous: sometimes, not in this case
off-topic: not exactly
intent to provoke/disrupt: not in my estimation
so, maybe 25-30% trollness.
I never get this impression from his posts. They seem honest (if sometimes misguided) not malicious to me.
Can you say more about how you distinguish messages intended to provoke emotional response from those that are merely inflammatory?
Intent makes a difference for me. private_messaging seems to want to get his point across (not counting an occasional rant), without regard to the way his comments come across. I did not detect any intent of riling people up for its own sake.
(nods) That’s fair. Thanks for the clarification.
Hmm so you safely assume that I made up a requirement that the observed data be at the start of the string that is output?
I suspect that others downvote private_messaging because of his notoriety. I did downvote his comment because he strayed away from my explicit (estimate the complexity of the Newton’s 2nd law) request and toward a flogged-to-death topic of MWI vs the world. Such a discussion has proven to be unproductive time and again in this forum.
Likewise. (With the caveat that I endorse downvoting extreme cases based on notoriety so probably would have downvoted anyway.)